


Let them use the office of a deacon, being found blameless

by hotot



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Bigotry & Prejudice, Brief Gore, Canonical Character Death, Deacon Backstory, Dubious Consent Due To Identity Issues, Hate Crimes, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Nonbinary Deacon, Other, Spoilers, Suicidal Thoughts, Tearjerker, Tragedy, Unhappy Ending, Uninformed Consent, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-06
Updated: 2017-01-06
Packaged: 2018-09-15 05:15:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9220229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hotot/pseuds/hotot
Summary: Before he was Deacon, he met a girl.~~~Fill for the Fallout Kinkmeme: How did your character meet their significant other, and how does the relationship end?This is not pretty, but handled with care. Read the tags. Complementary tissues at the door.





	

People don’t just fall from the sky.

They walk into your life—and then walk back out again—or they barge in—and then fade away—or they are there all along—until they just aren’t anymore.

He learns this at a young age.

It’s because he isn’t strong. He tires to become a man like everyone expects him to be, and then he’ll be able walk into people’s lives—and back out when he pleases—but he grows, and he never feels like a man. When the word _man_ fails him, he finds synonyms: _strong_ and _powerful._

The UP Deathclaws show him that strength must be proven and power must be taken. Power is a finite resource, like electricity, like oil, like clean water. Strength is inborn and must be demonstrated. Not everyone can be strong, and only the strong have power.

He has to prove that he is a man, that he is not a synth, because secretly he is afraid that he is not a man, that he is a synth. That he’s different.

Synths are easy targets—the Institute makes it hard to trust everyone. Doubting a person’s nature runs rampant along the coast, not just from the gangs, but from parents, from friends. Anyone could be a synth, and no one is safe from being taken away and replaced by one.

He joins the UP Deathclaws by kicking a downed synth in the ribs. The beating leaves the man broken, whimpering.

He leaves the UP Deathclaws when they wrap a rope around a supposed synth’s neck, and he says nothing, and does nothing to stop it.

They find him when he tries to run. They break his ribs and leave him broken, whimpering, but they don’t put a rope around his neck because he’s still human _._ Not a _synth_. Not a _monster. But not a man._

When he can walk again, he wanders. He loots derelict schools and libraries, crawling with ferals, and he takes books mostly written for children, because that’s all he can really wrap his head around. He feels foolish at first. He’s too old for stories. Too much a man, he thinks. But, the books are interesting, and he can’t stop. He starts with real things, true things. He reads history. Learns that there _was_ history. _Before_ history. He learns about life before the Great War. Studies pictures. Everyone is so _clean._

It all seems so simple. He starts to wonder how the world got this way. Who started it? What was China? Alaska? The Resource Wars? Colonization? Annexation?

Then he finds the stories. He reads a book about a boy made of wood, whose nose grows longer when he lies. He reads a book about a lonely prince who lives on something called an asteroid—something like the moon—with a fox and a flower. He reads a book about a girl who’s house falls from the sky and lands in a strange new world that offers her magic and power, but she just wants to go home to Kansas. Whatever Kansas is. Was.

Strange that living on the moon settles into his imagination more easily than a place called “Kansas.” At least he can _see_ the moon, when the sky is clear.

He tries to forget. The stories help.

He doesn't realize that absolution doesn't just fall from the sky.

He has to earn it—every day—and remember what he has done—the nightmares are the worst—only his death will bring peace, because it means he will no longer dream about the jerk of feet.

He can’t sleep. He speaks only when he has to, using as few words as possible. He wants to die with a rope around his neck, feet kicking and men laughing as the rictus of a violent death freezes across his face.

He wonders if that death will feel for him the way it felt for the synth. He wonders if the man they hung _was_ a synth. If he was, would that have made it less horrific? If he was, does that mean his actions and complacency in the face of violence and hatred could be forgiven?

He doesn’t yet know that he will die without being forgiven.

He learns this eventually.

For now, he reads. He reads and he gets better at understanding the stories, and it’s easy to forget about the whole Commonwealth and get lost in the worlds inside the words. They are lies, of course. Made up, make believe, but he escapes into them. He read Raymond Chandler, Truman Capote, Harper Lee, Margaret Atwood, Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Beckett, Octavia Butler, Lovecraft, Poe, Achebe, Borjes, Murakami. He reads any book that he finds even half intact. Pulp, horror, romance, fantasy. He doesn’t understand everything, and he doesn’t finish half the books because most are torn or burnt or rotted, missing pages, or he’s missing context. He learns about places he’s never heard of, and he wonders if they are real places. He wonders if Kansas is a real place. He wonders if it’s true that men once walked on the moon.

He reads and reads, until she falls from the sky.

Not literally, of course. No, that would be something out of a story book. Perhaps she fell to earth while he wasn’t looking, and then walked into his life, just like any normal person might do.

Except she isn’t normal.

She’s exceptional. He never gets to find out what she sees in him, because he’s too afraid to ask.

“What are you reading?” She asks him the first time they meet. She’s new to the settlement, and the Commonwealth, trying to make friends. She just walks right up to him, bold as you please, that green dress swaying around her calves and her dusty brown hair all in her face. He doesn’t look up to notice more than that.

No one talks to the reclusive, sharp-edged ginger-haired laborer who’s got his nose in some old world book when he’s not scavenging, chopping wood, hauling and purifying water, doing the things that young, strong people are expected to do.

Why look the gift horse of a strong young man in the mouth? This settlement doesn’t care about his past as long as he works and keeps his head down.

He’s safe, and nobody cares about him, which means he’s free. But Barbara, she doesn't care about what people expect. Maybe she wants to talk to him just _because_ no one else will. Just to spite expectations.

“Um.  _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_ ,” he answers.

“Oh.” She seems to consider his words for a moment, the lazy, chugging drone of a generator filling the silence. “What’s ‘zen’?”

“I’m not sure.” She’s still standing there, blocking his light. Annoyed, he stabs a finger on the page to mark the paragraph he’s half way through, and looks up.

Her eyes match the color of the afternoon sky behind her, and they dance with laughter. “I never see people reading old world books. People don’t read anything but magazines.” She looks at his finger in the book. “Read something aloud,” she says.

“What?” His voice feels rusty and he knows he sounds harsh. He’s not sure if he’s asking what he should read, or if he’s asking what she wants, in general.

“Just… anything. What you were just reading, even.” She plucks a Fancy Lad’s from her pocket and unwraps it, takes a bite. Crumbs spill from her lips, and the corner of his mouth curves up.

“Go on…” she urges, sitting on the stump next to him.

He clears the rust from his throat and realizes he’s staring. He drops his eyes to the yellowed pages of the fragile book and drags his finger across the letters as he reads. He stumbles, but she just listens.

“ _Old_... uh… _world_ … sorry. Not world.” He tries again. “ _Old word, so ancient it’s_ … Um. _It's almost drowned. Drowned out.”_ He finds a cadence, lets himself get lost in the words without worrying about their meaning. Sometimes even when he doesn't understand he can still enjoy the feel of the words. _“What a change through the centuries. Now anybody can be 'kind.' And everybody’s supposed to be. Except that long ago it was something you were born into and couldn’t help. Now it’s just a faked-up attitude half the time, like teachers the first day of class. But what do they really know about kindness who are not kin?_ ” [1]

She’s staring at him as he finishes.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” she says. Her eyes crinkle as she pretends not to smile.

“I know,” he says, says it like there’s a rope around his neck.

“You’re a strange person.” She pulls another Fancy Lad’s from pocket and hands it to him. He suppresses a shiver as her fingers brush the blisters on his hand. She’s so _clean._ Well, comparatively. “What’s your name?”

He tells her his name.

“I’m Barbara,” she says, even though he doesn't ask. She smiles at him, like he is the best example of a human that she’d ever seen, and the rope squeezes at his windpipe, making it impossible to speak. She must not have seen very many humans, to look at him like that.

His ears burn, turning red, and the rest of his face follows quickly after.

~~~

They find a friendlier settlement, one by the water. It’s irradiated, but it’s beautiful. Funny how the Commonwealth has become beautiful with Barbara there to point out all the amazing things in it. Sunsets. Dogs. She loves dogs, and collecting different colored stones washed smooth by the sea, and she loves singing. He calls her Songbird, and Moonflower. She tries to teach him to sing, but he can’t carry a tune. He can whistle, though. He teaches her how to sew, and cook things besides mac n’ cheese and Fancy Lad’s. She reminds him how to laugh.

She reminds him how to laugh without being cruel.

He reads less now and works more. Physical labor grounds him, convinces him he’s good at something besides thinking and destroying, gives him little glances at life beyond survival. He builds them a house, a little shack with four and a half walls, and she fills it with things: the old world widgets they like to take apart and wonder over. The widgets never get fixed and they just use the parts for scrap, but it’s more fun to play historian then it is to be a simple scavver. She asks wandering traders to bring them any books they might find. They read aloud to each other, and her ability to read improves daily. In less than a year they have a hoard.

He feels like maybe he’s going to be okay. He feels kind, and he feels okay with being kind for the first time in his life. He doesn’t feel like a man, not really, and that’s okay too, because he’s never been anything but a person, and suddenly feeling _human_ is the right thing to feel. He doesn’t have to strive for violent strength, heady power because there is something stronger than either, and he finds it in Barbara.

She talks about the Capital Wasteland sometimes. Her parents came north to find good farmland, but died of radiation poisoning. Despite being alone she learned farming, and could defend herself. He admires her remarkable kindness, and her inability to harden despite the unspeakable difficulties of living in their lost world, a world where he doesn't know what “zen” is, or where “Kansas” is, or _why_ the big one happened, but left them knowing things like “war” and “bomb” and gave them things like the Deathclaws. He wondered if the word before had people like the Deathclaws, people like _him,_ or if cruelty was a side effect of atomic annihilation.

He _loves_ her. He’s never really loved anything before, except for stories, and stray cats, and being alone. He’s certainly never loved _anyone_ before _._

They plant a mutfruit orchard. They get married. He can’t shake the feeling that he should be living some whole other, wholly more miserable life.

He never tells her about the Deathclaws, because he can’t face the look she will have in her eyes when she forgives him.

They are trying for kids.

They don’t have kids that first married year, but the settlement grows, and there are strangers passing through.

There is rumor of Institute activity in the area. Up the coast there are rumors of someone disappearing, and then returning. People say she was replaced. Fear grips him, but he throws himself deeper into work, into building their orchard and starting a crop of tatos even as the old sins creep back to worry at him nights when Barbara can’t sleep, and he can’t sleep.

He has no idea who says it first. It’s just a rumor. Barbara confronts the stares and muttering with her better nature, keeping her head high and her smile bright. But the funny looks become harassment, and they talk about what to do, if they should leave what they have built. He never doubts that she is human. The harassment lulls, and then someone else disappears and a mob descends, demanding the Barbara admit it. She’s a synth. Their orchard burns, the house he built burns, the books burn.

They run, and hide in some shitty old shipping containers on the beach, a place raiders or scavvers probably once used as a hideout. There's an old mattress that smells of mold and petrichor, and they think maybe it’s safe, huddled there together trying to figure out something that is impossible to know.

He knows only one way to prove that someone is a synth, and he refuses to think of it.

He asks her if she remembers anything about white walls, about feeling compelled. He says “the Institute” for the first time in five years, and this time the hate he throws into those words comes from a different place.

The hate he used to harbor for the Institute burns in him as he tries to comfort Barbara, convince her she’s human and not a synthetic person. The slick, half forgotten taste of fear and helplessness rise in his throat like bile. He can’t fight the Institute, not when he can’t see it, or understand it. His hate is useless because it doesn't change anything. The Institute still plays that old world game called chess with the lives of mere mortals, replacing them with synthetic replicas that mock whatever meager existence Wastelanders like him can claim as their own.

But this hate is different than it was before. It wouldn’t turn on her the way it turned on the man in University Point.

This hate rages because… if she _is_ a synth, that means the Institute is responsible for her and they just … threw her out, formed from whole cloth and unprepared for this _broken_ world that no one deserved. And if she is a synth, that means she just fell from the sky, and found _him_ , and the mob, and nothing good, or beautiful. She deserves so much more than he or this broken world can offer.

If Barbara is a synth it means she has no past. She exists only now, and not before the Institute made her and put fake memories in her head. But who’s to say those memories aren’t as real as things that actually happened.

The sins he has committed in his his own past feel less real and more impossible than the possibility that Barbara is a synth.

The past five years were nothing more than an exercise in self-deception, convincing himself that the Deathclaws were just a story he knew, that someone else and not _he_  stared in dawning horror while the Deathclaws watch their victim hang.

He can’t tell her now.

God, she’s so afraid. Not just of the mob, but of herself. She shakes, her teeth chatter, and he holds her but neither of them are steady. He’s not enough to ground her because he can’t stop thinking about how she was never his absolution.

She doesn’t remember anything about facilities or scientists. She remembers her parents, some of the Capitol Wasteland. It’s the same few stories over and over, and he _knows_. He thinks he knows. He's never really sure, but he  _thinks._

The thought that she really _did_ just fall from the sky plays like a stuttering holotape on a bad loop.

God, she dosen’t know. She doesn’t know that he could be just as much a danger to her as any mob, just because of his own bigotry, his lies and his secrets.

In those first few desperate hours of hiding he feels his skin crawl when she touches him, just a little, from old mnemonic impressions left over from when he hated synths, or thought he had to, to be a man. To prove that he was bigger than any Commonwealth boogieman.

She touches him and the edges of his kindness curl up like brittle old paper exposed to a flame. Not enough to ignite, but enough to worry him.

God, he’s so afraid of losing everything that should never have been his in the first place.

He kisses her goodbye, hides the hitch in his breath when their lips touch. He sneaks back to their shack to pick through the ashes for supplies, to think, just for a few minutes, plus travel time. She wants a book— _Pride and Prejudice_ maybe, that one is mostly intact, only a few parts missing or illegible. Maybe not everything has burned. They make up their own words to fill in, different every time. She wants something good, something he can read out loud to pass the time while they figure out what to do. Where to go. She’s crying when he leaves, but her eyes are so blue, full of trust, that he _knows…._

 _I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve._  [2] _  
_

He has nothing to be afraid of. What does he have to be afraid of?

He finds out what he has to be afraid of when he gets back to the shipping container, and sees a pair of feet, dangling, from behind the half broken door.

He cuts her down and she falls into his arms, and he just… holds her. Her murderers haven’t even checked for the synth components that might be in her skull. It’s not the way the operate. He thinks that maybe they don’t actually care if Barbara is a synth or not. They just want to hurt something that is different and don’t care about the truth, or proof, because it’s not required to justify their hatred.

It doesn’t matter that Barbara is—Barbara was... kind, and funny, and wise, or that she has—had... the most beautiful eyes. He closes them, but they won’t stay shut. It takes three tries, and by then his hands shake so violently he has to bury them in her dusty brown hair to keep them steady.

He can’t remember how long he holds her, rocking her body like he’s lulling her to sleep, but he’s sure days have passed, because one minute he’s holding Barbara and the next moment the barbed-wire-wrapped swatter in his hands connects with something meaty, and then shatters against a stone.

There is nothing left of the ganger, and the last one is already running. He falls to his knees, and looks around. He is back in the outskirts of University Point for the first time in five years, and there’s so much blood.

The worst part about it all, the part that he remembers most clearly is that they don’t even _recognize_ him. They didn’t know her name. They didn’t know anything except that there was a synth, and they took care of her, just like they were designed to do.

It’s a bit anticlimactic, really. He’s less an avenging angel and more a deranged madman, swinging a bat and screaming “you don’t remember?”

They don’t.

Everything else is just the sound of his heart and some unnamable horror beyond reckoning roaring vengeance in his ears.

He learns that absolution doesn't just fall from the sky. He has to earn forgiveness. Every day, for the rest of his life. It’s a disease, and there is no cure, but he starts looking for the medicine that will stave off its spread. He starts with booze. He moves on to chems. He looks for synths, just to see if he can tell that they are synths. He cannot. 

And he cannot tell apart humans from monsters.

He heads south, as far as he can go, with the vague impression that if he’s too much of a coward do it himself, the Glowing Sea will kill him. A mile in and he’s sick and vomiting, poisoned by the rads. His hair falls out in clumps, and he leaves a trail of orange when he crawls back to the badlands, where the mist is constant and just a touch yellowed by radiation seeping from the sea. He flushes his system.

He’s not ready to die, even though he wants to. It’s not fair that he’s not ready to die.

He heads south, prepared this time. His hair grows back. Maybe he’ll go to the Capitol Wasteland and see where Barbara’s memories told her she was from.

And he knows he will die without being forgiven.

~~~

[1]  _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values_ , Robert M. Prisig (1974)

[2]  _Pride and Prejudice,_ Jane Austen (First pub. 1813)

**Author's Note:**

> Well, now that I broke my own heart into a million pieces... I'm fine, how are you?
> 
> Seriously though. There are so many versions of Deacon's story in my head out there in the fandom. Barbara's story happened, or it didn't happen. He's a synth, he's not. He founded the Railroad, or he didn't. I have my own opinions, but that last affinity talk, man... I can't ever forget that he was a bigot that helped commit hate crimes, and he can never redeem himself for it. I really mean it when I say it in this fic. It's not just self flagellation on his part. The only thing he can do to find some way to make up for his early life is to do what he does with the Railroad, and never stop. If he stops, he fails at his redemption. IDK.


End file.
